The blacksmith declared, too, that he was 'fairly afeard o' pa'son' and his fierce threats of revenge, and was glad enough that they were not obliged to make the journey together, for he, having a horse, had ridden, while the parson had been constrained to walk.
'I reckon he's hyar by this time,' Fletcher said to Nathan Hoodendin, 'but I ain't a-hankerin' ter meet up with him agin. He's more like a wild beastis 'na man; ter see him cut his blazin' eye aroun' at ye, ye'd 'low ez he'd never hearn o' grace!'
The snow came with Kelsey.
One day, when the dull dawn broke, the white flakes were softly falling—silent, mysterious, ghostly invasion of the wild wintry air and the woods. All adown chasms and ravines, unexplored and unknown, the weird palpitating motion animated the wide and desert spaces. The ground was deeply covered; the drifts filled the hollows; they burdened the crests of the jutting crags and found a lodgment in all the fissures of their dark and rugged faces. The white lines on the bare black boughs served to discriminate their sylvan symmetry. Vague solemnities pervaded the silent marshalling of these forces of Nature.
The wind held its breath. An austere hush lay upon the chilled world. The perspective had its close limitations and the liberties of vision were annulled. Only the wild things were abroad; but the footprints of the rabbit or the deer were freshly filled, and the falling snow seemed to possess the world. When it ceased at last, it lay long on the ground, for the cold continued. And the wilderness was sheeted and still.
There were presently visible occasional ruts winding in and out among the trees, marking the course of the road and the progress of some adventurous waggon and ox-team—sometimes, too, the hoof-prints of a saddle-horse. One might easily judge how few of the mountaineers had ventured out since the beginning of the 'cold snap.' These marks were most numerous in front of the log-house where Hiram Kelsey and his uncle and the two old men sat around the fire. There was a prevalent curiosity as to how the parson had endured the double humiliation of imprisonment and being cast out of the church. They were hardly prepared for the tempestuous fury which animated him upon the mention of the prosecution and the witnesses' names. But when hesitating inquiries were propounded by those of his visitors disposed to controversy—seeking to handle his heresies and gauge his infidelity—he would fall from the ecstasies of rage to a dull despondency.
'I dunno,' he would say, looking into the heart of the red fire. 'I can't sati'fy my mind. Some things in the Bible air surely set contrariwise. I can't argyfy on 'em. But thar's one thing I kin feel—Christ the Lord liveth. An' sometimes that seems doctrine enough. An' mebbe some day I'll find Him.'
A thaw came on, checked by a sudden freeze. He thought it as cold as ever one afternoon about sunset as he trudged along the road. He saw a tiny owl, perched in a cedar-tree hard by the rail-fence. The creature's feathers were ruffled, and it looked chill. The atmosphere was of a crystalline clearness. The mountains in the east had dropped the snow from the darkling pines, but above, the towering balds rose in unbroken whiteness, imposed in onyx-like distinctness upon the azure sky. There were vague suggestions of blue and violet and rose on the undulations of the steep, snow-covered slopes close at hand. The crags were begirt with icicles, reaching down many feet and brilliant with elusive prismatic glimmers. He heard a sudden crash: a huge scintillating pendant had fallen by its own weight. Chilhowee stood massive and richly purple beyond the snowy valley; above was a long stretch of saffron sky, and in its midst the red sun was going down. He stood to watch its fiery disc slip behind the mountains, and then he turned and pursued his way through the neutral-tinted twilight of the wintry evening.
Old Cayce's log-cabin rose up presently, dark and drear against the high and snowy slopes behind it. The drifts still lay thatch-like on the roof; the eaves were fringed with icicles. The overhanging trees were cased in glittering icy mail. The blackened corn-stalks, left standing in the field as is the habit until next spring's ploughing should begin, were writhen and bent, and bore gaunt witness to the devastation of the winter wind. The smoke was curling briskly from the chimney, and as the door opened to his knock, the great fire of hickory and ash, sending up yellow and blue flames all tipped with vivid scarlet, cast a genial flare upon the snowy landscape, slowly darkening without. He experienced a sudden surprise as his eye fell upon old man Cayce, the central figure of the group, having heard stories of the moonshiner's deep depression, consequent upon the disastrous raid, and of the apathy into which he had fallen. They hardly seemed true. He sat erect in his chair, his supple frame alert, his eye intent, every fibre charged with energy, his face deeply flushed. He looked expectant, eager. His stalwart sons sat with him in a semicircle about the wide, warm hearth. All their pipes were freshly alight, for the evening meal was just concluded. They, too, wore an aspect of repressed excitement.
Kelsey detected it in their abstraction during the formal greetings, and when he was seated among them, ever and anon they shifted uneasily in their chairs, which grated harshly on the puncheon floor. Sometimes there sounded a faint jingling of spurs when they moved their feet on the ill-adjusted stones of the hearth. They had their pistols in their belts and perchance their lives in their hands. His admission was in some sort a confidence, but although he marvelled, he said nothing.